Imperial Debris in Janet Frame's To the Is-Land (1982)

ABSTRACT

This article explores Janet Frame's first autobiography To the Is-Land, reading Frame's relentless cataloguing of objects as indicative of her wider, post-imperial, life writing project. Frame insists that her ancestors (white Scottish settlers who arrived in New Zealand as part of a chain migration) ‘survive as a presence in objects [such] as a leather workbag, a pair of ribbed butter pats, a handful of salmon spoons’ (7). But the meaning of these objects is never stable: they are frequently lost, broken, or their significance is misinterpreted. Reading against the grain of this insistent cataloguing, I argue that these objects are detritus, rather than heirlooms and that Frame's life writing is filled with imperial debris which resists colonial taxonomies. Through this strategic confusion of objects and origin stories, Frame challenges an understanding of empire as a beginning point or determinant within her life writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Janet Frame
• empire
• objects
• autobiography

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Emma Parker is a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds whose doctoral research examines the life writing of Penelope Lively, Doris Lessing and Janet Frame. She has published articles and reviews in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Doris Lessing Studies, Wasafiri, Moving Worlds and is a contributor to Documenting Trauma in Comics (2020). She is currently co-editing a collection of essays entitled British Culture After Empire: Migration, Race and Decolonisation, which is forthcoming with Manchester University Press.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 By drawing our attention to this Frame implies that her signed name is an invention, rather than an inheritance (as Frame is her father's surname and Paterson from her maternal grandmother). This is further complicated by her unusual decision to change her name by deed poll, in 1958, to Nene Janet Paterson Clutha, writing under her birth name, but living with a pseudonym.

2 Frame (2012) had already depicted this episode in the short story ‘Between My Father and the King’. In this fictionalised version Frame's father creates an alternative litany of goods, debt and payment, charging the sovereign for the damage wrought upon his body during the First World War. As with To the Is-Land however, the authority of the post-imperial monarch is manifest as a literal intruder within the home.

3 The fascination with furnishings and material objects which are impressed by the bodies of their human owners can be found elsewhere (and arguably everywhere) in Frame's fiction. For example, The Edge of the Alphabet (1962) largely takes place in rented rooms where ‘chair[s], all the tables, sofas, even the walls’ must be covered so as ‘not to have the furniture rimmed with tide marks where the human head and arms and legs had rested’ (198). Frame's fascination with the relationship between furniture and people or with how objects may confer/deny their owner's personhood, is apparent across her entire oeuvre.